Iron Mountain ski jump

Thursday, March 26, 2015

MARCHING TOWARD JUSTICE

Bill
Walters is retired now. He used to be head of the National Park Service. 60
years ago, though, he was just an Illinois kid on a bus in Alabama, on the way
to basic training for the army. A couple of girls his age were sitting in front
of him. The girls were pretty, and Bill was handsome, so naturally they got to
talking. Eventually one of them asked him, “What do you think about the problem
with the coloreds?” Bill allowed as he didn’t see a problem, since colored
people were just like anyone else. Those pretty girls jumped up and screamed with
their pretty bright red mouths to the whole bus, “We’ve got a goddammed
nigger-lover on this bus!” After that bus experience, he said, basic training
was a piece of cake.

On
March 7 we commemorated Bloody Sunday, March 7, 60 years ago, when peaceful
demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, asking simply for their rights as citizens to
be voters, were attacked by police and civilians and brutally beaten. They were
local black folks of Dallas County who had tried to register to vote, but were
denied that most basic right of citizens. They wanted to march to the state
capitol to appeal. They were not only denied the right to vote, but the right
to walk.

They
did get attention. Others came to help them, including the Indiana Methodist
Student Movement. The Alabama Methodist Student Movement called us up and said,
“We’re going to join the march outside Montgomery on March 24 and march into
the city with Dr. King. Come and walk with us.” We did. I was the Methodist
campus minister at Indiana State University and Rose Polytechnic Institute [now
Rose-Human University] in Terre Haute. With my good friend, Andre’ Hammonds,
the first black person to receive a PhD from the U of TN, a sociology professor
at ISU, and Bob Mullins, the student president of the Wesley Foundation, I was
on the third of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, the one that actually
arrived, and heard MLK speak from the steps of the State House, on March 25.

My
contribution to Civil Rights is so minor compared to so many others, like John
Lewis, now Congressman John Lewis, who was in the front rank of that march. All
I did was walk for a while in heat and fear. Like MLK and Jimmie Lee Jackson
and Medgar Evans and Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb and Michael Schwerner and James
Chaney and Andrew Goodman, and so many others, John Lewis put his life on the
line.

In
the fall of 2014 John Lewis spoke at Michigan State University. My
granddaughter got in line to get his autograph on a copy of March to give to me as a gift. She told
him that I had been there. “Please thank him for me,” he said. I have been
thanked a lot of times in a lot of ways for many things. I appreciate them all,
but none of them quite equal that vote of thanks.

There
are still forces that want to deny certain people the right to vote, to deny
them even the right to walk. Try being a black person walking in an expensive
all-white neighborhood if you don’t believe that. There are still nigger-haters
on the bus. There are still folks who can’t believe they are included unless
they can see that others are excluded, who cannot feel comfortable in their
rights and opportunities unless others are denied those same rights and
opportunities. We need to love those excluders, assure them that they are loved
and included, that they belong.

In
the meantime, though, we can’t allow them to exclude others. No one has a right
to deny rights to others. Love isn’t really love, peace isn’t really peace,
unless they include justice.

John
Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I
googled Selma to check some of my facts. “Selma civil rights march” came up in
the list after Selma Cinema 6. That’s either a sign of significant improvement
or significant back-sliding.

You
can read more about this in my book, The
Strange Calling.

The
“place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula [The UP], where life is defined by winter even in the summer!
[This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]